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Summary

Corey Owens, Uber Technologies

Corey Owens is Head of Global Public Policy at Uber Technologies, a software platform that connects consumers with transport options in more than 80 cities around the world. At the transport Innovation talks, Owens presented the case for using Big Data and technology to enable users to choose personalised forms of mobility that meets their needs and not be tied to using their own car (which is expensive, bad for the environment or not safe, e.g. after drinking alcohol), public transport (which is inflexible and may not be available) and traditional for-hire transportation such as taxis (which may be unreliable and can offer sub-standard service). Uber proposes to use technology to more efficiently match demand and supply, using existing infrastructure – the cars already on the streets and their drivers – by matching them with people who are looking for a quick way from A to B. This is also beneficial for drivers: Data-driven visibility of what happens in the city allows drivers to make seek out new business; security for drivers is also improved because of digital payments. This is also good for government, as the absence of cash makes tax fraud more difficult. Not least, with 40% of traffic circling looking for parking, maximising the use of existing assets can help reduce congestion.

Carlo Ratti, SENSEable City Laboratory

An architect and engineer by training, Carlo Ratti directs the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has co-authored over 250 publications, holds several patents and his work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, MoMA in New York City and MAXXI in Rome. In 2012, Wired Magazine listed him among ‘50 people who will change the world’. At the Transport Innovation Talk, Ratti presented several projects. HubCab is an initiative that uses Big Data to unravel the complexity of travel patterns. By connecting billions of data points it establishes how many people want to go the same route and thus the potential ‘shareability’ of rides. Translated into a transport system based on sharing, 40% less cars would be needed in a city. Combined with autonomous vehicles, 4 out of 5 cars in cities would become superfluous. MIT plans to create the fi rst entirely self-driving community on Sentosa Island off Singapore. Two other projects Ratti presented were the Road Frustration Index (RFI), which uses GPS, cameras and sensors inside the car to quantify and analyse factors that lead to driver stress, and SkyCall, a drone that is linked to a smartphone app and can guide humans to their desired destination, e.g. a particular room on MIT’s campus.

Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen Design

Eric Rodenbeck is the founder of San Francisco based Stamen Design. He has worked at the frontier of data visualisation and interactive mapping since 2001, and his work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the Transport Innovation Talks, Rodenbeck focused on how visualisation can extract meaning from data. Data visualisations are often question-generating rather than for answer-providing tools. But they can be used in an exploratory way that generates not just insights, but new kinds of insights. Rodenbeck presented two recent projects: Stamen turned billions of data points representing individual sales on the NASDAQ computerised stock exchange into patterns that reveal how sales robots generate profits from market movements. In another project, Stamen collected data on San Francisco’s controversial private transit systems, operated by some Silicon Valley firms for commuting employees and collectively known as “Google bus”. As the operators were unwilling to share data about their service, Stamen relied on social media and field workers to identified bus stops, routes, schedules and user numbers. Stamen then created a map which presents the private bus network as if it were a public transport system where transit from, say, the Google to the Apple bus were possible – thereby stimulating the public debate about benefits and drawbacks of private versus public transit systems.

Richard Harris, Xerox Corporation

Richard Harris is Solution Director at the Xerox Corporation, where he has worked on the Merge project, which he presented at the Transport Innovation Talks. Merge is a smart parking system that uses data from meters and street sensors to feed information about parking rates and directions to free spaces to cell phones and navigation systems. It also allows payment by cell phone. Critically, Merge uses smart pricing algorithms to adjust parking rates based on demand, creating an incentive for drivers to use a different mode or to park further away. The need to circle around looking for parking is reduced, less time is lost and congestion reduced. Merge, which has been in operation in downtown Los Angeles since June 2012, was awarded the ITF’s 2014 Promising Innovation in Transport Award